Comment by dragontamer

> Whether source code is best represented as a linear document.

But source code is NOT represented as a linear document. At a minimum, source code is represented by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of files across a file system.

As such, source code on a filesystem is a highly-connected graph. Source code is hypertext: classes, functions, and data-structures take you to different files in your directory tree.

Take some ASync code you have, and tell me: how many documents / files do you have to read before you really know what the async code does from beginning to end? There's nothing linear about our code layout actually.

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If your question is: "Is an individual code block best represented as a linear document" ?? Then I would argue yes. At a micro-level, code executes from the beginning, and ends at the bottom (except for calls and jumps). But calls / jumps are well represented in our "implicit graph" (function call to another "document" in our file system)

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I guess there's an open question about loops: they do NOT progress from top-to-bottom, but are still represented in linear form. Maybe there's a new representation you can have for them. (But maybe that's why "recursive" calls are so powerful: a "recursive" call actually matches the graph-based indirection of our code).